With the industry moving at such a fast pace, new innovations are being introduced all of the time. Manufacturers are inventing great new products that offer many benefits; solving the problems of the present to provide a better future. The biggest problem that they face, though, is launching these products on to the market. This is where BIM could really help.

I think it’s fair to say that people don’t really like change. We like to stick to what we know and what we feel comfortable with. This seems to be the case in our industry. Many people, from consultants to installers, are still completing jobs and planning projects in the same way they’ve been doing it for years; that is in very traditional ways. A prime example is how there is still much use of two port control systems despite Pressure Independent Control Valves having been around now for quite a while. These newer products are faster to implement and more reliable in the long term, yet there is still a reluctance with some people to adopt the new technology.

It’s true that with any new product there’s inevitably a big learning curve to using them, and often training can be time consuming. There’s also the fear of risk. If people use a new product that they’re not so familiar with then there’s always the chance that it will go wrong. This could be because the user isn’t so experienced at using it, but also it could turn out that it wasn’t the ideal product after all and sometimes knowledge and experience can really help when making decisions. This is where BIM steps in.

Using BIM, manufacturers can create models, which I like to think of as ‘Lego blocks’, that they can send to customers to introduce them to a product. And they can do this long before any decisions have been made, at the very initial stages. The ‘Lego block’ would be a visually simplified model that not only clearly defines the spatial envelope and connection points, but also includes a wealth of ‘metadata’. This ‘metadata’ contains data fields specific to the particular products, such as flow rates for valves or electrical loads for powered devices.

That all means that clients can look at the products in detail and trial them in their plans from the very beginning. They will be given the time to properly analysis products and see how they will work within the system and how they will interact with other components.

By starting with the end in mind and properly understanding the system at the initial stage, it will help to future proof the project far down the line. It’s also the cheapest time to detect any issues. The easiest time to make a design or selection change is at the beginning of a project and BIM facilitates this in a much more user friendly manner than ever before. This would undoubtedly give them much more confidence in the products they’re looking to use and would, very importantly, remove that fear of risk.

BIM provides users with the time and ability to put much more thought into their projects earlier on, minimising that risk further down the line. This then increases the chance of far more successful project that works with the best products, potentially the latest and more developed ones, and there’s much more chance of it being on time and to budget.

Manufacturers, like Marflow Hydronics, have been doing this to help bring new products into the limelight that otherwise customers may have been apprehensive about. More importantly, this has helped all parties get the right products specified when they may not have been otherwise. BIM may be the ideal solution to help us move more quickly into the future using more innovative products and having many of the niggling issues that have been around for so long vastly reduced, if not eliminated.

This was a guest post by Ian Harman, Technical Applications Engineer at Marflow Hydronics, BSRIA Member

If you are looking to find out more information about BIM, BSRIAruns two specific training courses:

Months are spent putting them together, and thousands of pounds are spent printing and promoting them, but it still seems that the wealth of documentation out in the industry, that could help users design, install and commission systems, is not always used.

No one could just pick up a pen one day and design a flawless system, whatever core skills they have. It takes training and understanding; it takes skills that have to be developed over many years. To support this, collected groups of people with the right knowledge and experience produce documentation that explains best practice and provide methods for success. But in our busy industry, there isn’t always time to sit and follow best practice guidelines, sometimes you just have to use the best knowledge you have.

What if you were baking a cake, though, would you just use your best knowledge then? You may have made a cake before, but are you really going to remember every single step, every single ingredient, every single amount to be used? And if you did just use your memory, would you really expect the cake to turn out perfectly? It’s highly unlikely.

So why not follow the ‘recipe’ when designing, installing and commissioning systems?

Designing Long Term

In my team, we’re always telling our customers to start with the end in mind. The first step is always the design stage. It’s vital that this is done with the complete picture in mind, keeping all the factors of how it’s going to work long term, in real life conditions, in mind. For example, what are the best products to use? How will seasonal commissioning take place? How can you optimise efficiency? It’s far easier for all contingencies to be considered up front, because if you realise you’re missing something further down the road it’s much harder to add it in later. If we go back to the cake analogy, you wouldn’t start to bake a cake without considering what sort of cake it’s going to be. If you later decided you wanted a chocolate sponge, it would be too late to add the cocoa after you’ve started to cook it. Full consideration of every point needs to be done up front.

Ultimately, designers want to make sure that they design the most efficient systems possible using the simplest method. No matter what the system, problems will always be inevitable, so designers also need to think about how systems can be troubleshooted when things do go awry that will cause limited disruption and can offer the quickest solution.

All this leads to one conclusion: a system needs to be designed so it can work as well as it possibly can, with a few contingencies in mind.

CIBSE Commissioning Code W

Doing it Right

The documentation that’s been put together by collected groups of experts should provide anyone with all the information they need. A Commissioning Code, for example, such as Code W, will provide guidance on what needs to be specified and included to make a system work; and then a BSRIA document will give all the important detail to achieve individual areas such as Pre-Commissioning.

The benefit of such guides is that they are not the opinion of just one author, they are made up of the knowledge of a group of experienced individuals who have to agree on what the best practice is, providing the greatest possible level of information.

My team at Marflow Hydronics actively encourages the use of such documentation, as getting the design, installation and commissioning of systems right, and right first time, is so important to the long term welfare of any system.

This was a guest post by Ian Harman, Technical Applications Engineer at Marflow Hydronics, BSRIA Member

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